Wednesday, October 4, 2017

Post-election hiatus illustrates the perversity of MMP

The only thing that can be said with any certainty about the
next New Zealand government is that it will look very different from the last
one.

National party prime minister Bill English won an emphatic 13-seat
majority over the opposition Labour party at the weekend in an election result
that defied the pattern of history. But the vagaries of New Zealand’s mixed-member
proportional electoral system mean it could be weeks before the shape of the
new government is finalised, and no one can be sure what form it will take.
Paradoxically, it may not include the National party.

Not for the first time, New Zealand finds itself at the
mercy of the relatively small New Zealand First party (yes, it’s as nationalistic
as the name implies) and its fractious leader, Winston Peters. That’s because despite
winning 46 percent of the vote on election day, National doesn’t have the
numbers to govern on its own. Three of the minnow parties that supported the
government in its previous term crashed and burned, forcing English to look
elsewhere for a deal that will give him a parliamentary majority.

That unavoidably leads him to Peters’ door, since the
support of New Zealand First’s nine MPs would enable English to form a
government. But the two parties of the centre-left, Labour and the Greens, are
also courting Peters because his support would give them a one-seat majority –
perhaps more, once 384,000 special votes are counted.

That puts Peters in the box seat, which is exactly where he
likes to be. He will, in effect, determine the shape of the next government. No
one knows what price he will demand in return for this, or what concessions the
bigger parties will be prepared to make in order to humour him. Strangely, neither
does anyone question the morality of a political system that allows a party
leader to wield influence grossly disproportionate to his party’s share of the
vote (7.5 percent). But Peters can be
expected to make the most of the situation. At 72, it may be his last shot at power.

It’s a situation that illustrates the perversity of the MMP
system. Adopted in 1996 and modelled on the electoral system created in post-war
Germany to ensure that no extremist party could again win total power as the
Nazis did, MMP was promoted to Kiwi voters as a means of reasserting control
over rogue politicians. In fact it turned out to be every bit as flawed as the
first-past-the-post system it replaced.

Under MMP, voters are shut out of the game the moment the
votes are in. Unless one party has an absolute majority, which hasn’t happened
in any of the eight elections since MMP was introduced, the politicians then disappear
behind closed doors to do whatever furtive horse-trading is necessary to cut a
deal.

At that point, all bets are off. Every policy dangled in
front of voters during the election campaign is effectively up for negotiation.
What were solemnly declared on the campaign trail to be bottom lines become
wondrously elastic or evaporate altogether. Voters have no influence over this
process and can only await the outcome.

It doesn’t help that there are no clear constitutional
conventions governing coalition arrangements. There’s a compelling moral argument
that minor parties should first offer their support to whichever party has won
the greatest number of votes. In this instance, that would clearly be National.

But politicians are free to interpret the rules in whichever
way suits them. Labour and the Greens rationalise that because more people voted
against National than voted for it, there’s a mandate for change – although
it’s hard to imagine a potentially more fractured and dysfunctional coalition
than one between Labour, the Greens and the socially conservative Peters party.

New Zealand has found itself in this predicament before, and
it’s not a comfortable place to be. By instinct Peters is an attack politician,
which helps explain why previous coalitions he has been part of – one with
National, one with Labour – have ended acrimoniously.

He’s a true maverick: combative, polarising and capricious.
He relies for support on a dwindling constituency of ageing voters who yearn
for the reassuring certainties of the New Zealand they remember from the 1970s
under authoritarian National prime minister Robert Muldoon, Peters’ role model.
It was an era when New Zealand was comfortably monocultural and subject to
suffocating state regulation.

So while English was nominally a clear winner on election night,
he now has to curry favour with a politician whose support is smaller than
National’s by a factor of six. He may even end up in opposition. It takes some
of the shine off what was, in most respects, a signal victory.

English’s success was notable for two reasons. Conventional
political wisdom decreed that the tide had gone out for National, since no New
Zealand government had won a fourth term since 1969. A late resurgence by
Labour, re-energised under its popular new leader Jacinda Ardern, reinforced a
sense that New Zealand might be about to revert to the historical norm.

But English, the Catholic son of a South Island farming
family, not only swam against the current of history. He also emerged from the
shadow of former prime minister John Key, under whom he served as deputy and finance
minister until Key’s surprise resignation last December.

In the Key government, English did the heavy lifting behind
the scenes while the supposedly more charismatic Key took care of the public charm
offensive. Although credited with guiding New Zealand safely through the global
financial crisis, English wasn’t seen as either charismatic or populist. He
partly reversed that perception during an election campaign in which he came
across as genial and relaxed. But more important than that, he has erased the
notion that National’s success in three elections was entirely due to Key’s
personal popularity.

It would seem a cruelly ironic blow if, after accomplishing
that, he ended up on the opposition benches putting questions to a 37-year-old Labour
prime minister who has never held a cabinet post or even served in government.
But under New Zealand’s topsy-turvy electoral system, and with a politician as
contrary and unpredictable as Peters in the mix, it can’t be ruled out.

2 comments:

Mr du Fresne, I hope you will read the comments on Stuff in response to your opinion piece titled 'Voters lose control...', especially from those who are supportive of MMP. It might open your mind a little to the other side of the argument over it.I would add to their comments that we do not directly elect our Prime Minister, the government party caucus does, and we did not under FPP either, so it is not as though we voters have ever had complete 'control' over the outcome in any case. You might have voted for 'Bill' or 'Jacinda' or 'Winston' because you think that is all that really matters, rather than the party platform as a whole, but there is no guarantee that person will become or remain the Prime Minister. Look at how Mr English was ushered in after Mr Key resigned. Who voted for him to do that at the time? Not most New Zealand voters, it was done with the permission of the caucus and senior party officials.It is nonsense and a fabrication to argue Mr Peters has sole 'control' over the composition of the next government. That comes down to all the parties elected.MMP is designed to encourage cooperation and negotiation between parties, a sharing of ideas, as befits any grown-up gathering that wants to come up with good outcomes for a group. We voters have determined the portions of seats each party gets and now the parties must cooperate and negotiate.I am sorry you feel that is so bad.

I would tend to agree that the MMP system definitely has its flaws. What I don't like as well is the fact that many people get into Parliament who were not actually elected by voters. I am referring to the list MPs. At least under first past the post everyone who went into Parliament was elected by the majority of voters in their electorate. MMP has allowed radical groups like the Greens to gain representation when it is unlikely that any of their MPs would actually be given a majority by any electorate.

I do wonder what was so wrong with first past the post that we rejected it for MMP? And can we go back?

About Me

I am a freelance journalist and columnist living in the Wairarapa region of New Zealand. In the presence of Greenies I like to boast that I walk to work each day - I've paced it out and it's about 15 metres. I write about all sorts of stuff: politics, the media, music, wine, films, cycling and anything else that piques my interest - even sport, though I admit I don't have the intuitive understanding of sport that most New Zealand males absorb as if by osmosis. I'm a former musician (bass and guitar) with a lifelong love of music that led me to write my book 'A Road Tour of American Song Titles: From Mendocino to Memphis', published by Bateman NZ in July 2016. I've been in journalism for more than 40 years and like many journalists I know a little bit about a lot of things and probably not enough about anything. I have never won any journalism awards.